Third generation partnership project (3GPP) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile telecommunication systems provide high data rate, lower latency and improved system performances. With the increasing demand for higher system capacity, radio access technology (“RAT”) is one area for improvement. The new RAT (“NR”) is developed for the next generation wireless system.
One of the considerations for the NR design is to secure the forward compatibility. The system design principles to ensure forward compatibility and compatibility of different features is strived for: maximizing the amount of time and frequency resources that can be flexibly utilized or that can be left blanked without causing backward compatibility issues in the future; minimizing transmission of always-on signals; and confining signals and channels for physical layer functionalities (signals, channels, signaling) within a configurable/allocable time and/or frequency resource.
In addition, the service requirements can be quite diverse for different services in 5G system. In particular, it may cause the different numerologies to support the different services for efficient transmission. For example, the URLLC characterized by the low latency may be favored by the large subcarrier spacing for the data transmission with the shorter subframe length, whereas the delay tolerant mMTC services may use the small subcarrier spacing with the longer symbol length for coverage extension by concentrating the power at a narrower channel bandwidth.
Therefore, a single access to the system for provision of multiple services potentially using different numerologies with the compact common channel/signal transmission will be beneficial for achieving the forward compatibility and efficiency.